FiLiA Response to Amnesty Apology
We welcome Amnesty International UK's apology and its acknowledgement that FiLiA, and other women's organisations, should never have been labelled ‘anti-rights’ in their A Growing Threat: the Anti-rights Movement in the UK report. We also welcome the announcement of an independent external review.
This was not an isolated editorial slip. Amnesty’s previous report Like A Snowball, which built on the same assumptions, has also been quietly removed, and two documents targeting women's rights organisations in quick succession point to something far more systemic than a single briefing that bypassed sign-off. If the review only asks how this document was published, it will miss the point. It needs to ask why.
In October 2021, protestors demonstrating against our conference in Portsmouth carried sexually abusive and threatening placards, including material Amnesty International UK admitted it had supplied. Amnesty subsequently distanced itself from the conduct of that protest, while conceding it had provided materials to the organisers. Five years on, we are again being publicly mischaracterised by the same organisation which claims to be ‘committed to creating a future where human rights are enjoyed by everyone.’ We take this moment to remind Amnesty that women’s rights are also human rights.
FiLiA calls on Amnesty to confirm, publicly, that the scope of its external review will explicitly examine its institutional approach to women's sex-based rights organisations and campaigners, and to commit to publishing its findings in full. It is time that they recognised the cumulative impact this ongoing treatment has had on women's organisations like FiLiA. Amnesty has been given a real opportunity here to redress the balance and we urge them to take it.
Lisa-Marie Taylor,
FiLiA CEO